Thursday, April 22, 2010

I know you all like (cough) my long winded and analytical articles, but we'll take a short break from that to allow for a service announcement concerning our busy Qt developers, Maemo 5 and your evergreen favourite update, PR1.2.

If you're an end user, the short version is - the doors are open for more (and prettier) apps, plus we have a bridge that will make it easy to backport MeeGo apps to Maemo 5. If you're a developer and/or are interested in the gritty details, read on:

[Maemo community council hat]

One of the big changes PR1.2 brought us is official Qt support in the form of Q4.6 in the Nokia SDK and repositories. This change affects all applications depending on Qt currently in extras-devel. We had some talks with Qt/Nokia folks about Qt-related repository changes in Maemo 5 (triggered by aforementioned PR1.2 and potentially again later on by updates to Qt or related components). Here is the short summary:

as soon as 4.6 QtMobility is released, get those packages to the nokia-apps repository

remove 4.6 QtMobility from extras-devel

maybe upload new QtMobility packages to extras-devel, but only for qt4-experimental (4.7) and with 'experimental' in the package name

maintainers of bindings and extensions to Qt are encouraged to follow the same nomenclature in their package names (i.e. using experimental in the name if depending on qt4-experimental)

use a Provides/Replaces/etc libqt4-maemo5 clause in the qt4-experimental packages (Qt4.7 packages should be binary compatible with the current 4.6 ones) so the packages can be deprecated peacefully

QML/declarative will be released as part of Qt4.7 (so qt4-experimental only, no 4.6.2/PR1.2 support)

[/Maemo community council hat]

What does this mean in plain English ? The libqt4-maemo5-* package names are deprecated in extras-devel. Use libqt4-experimental-* if you need Qt4.7 features, or libqt4-* if you want Qt4.6. Qt4.5 will no longer be supported after the release of PR1.2

This is just a side-effect of PR1.2, and the steps above are the results of a grassroots effort to make the Qt release cycle more transparent. Think 'what can we do while we are waiting for PR1.2'. The changes above will not speed up or slow things down, just make things more clear for developers (and help future updates cause less trouble).

As for what's stopping Nokia, it has been stated that there was a delay in PR1.2, so my educated guess is that there was a serious enough regression found late in the QA cycle that warranted the restart of a big part of the certification/QA/etc process. It was very unfortunate that it seems this happened after the SDK has already been released, but not much can be done about that now.